Use of Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Solving Integer and Mixed Integer Optimization Problems

This paper presents use of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm introduced by Kennedy and Eberhart [1] for solving Integer and Mixed Integer Optimization problems. In PSO, The potential solutions, called particles, are flown through the problem space by learning from the current optimal particle and its memory. PSO is started with a group of feasible solutions and a feasibility function is used to check if the new explored solutions satisfy all the constraints. All particles keep only those feasible solutions in their memory. PSO algorithm is used on 15 test problems given in the appendix. Our results show that PSO is an efficient method and can be used for solving integer and mixed integer optimization problems.